


The Hokage's Revenge

by JacarandaBanyan



Category: Naruto
Genre: All the adults in Konoha dropped the ball, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Blind obedience to the Third Hokage's stupid orders comes back to bite them all in the ass, Canon-Typical Violence, Hokage Uzumaki Naruto, M/M, Naruto’s not really a revenge person, Revenge, but this he can do with a smile on his face
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-06
Updated: 2020-06-06
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:28:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24567712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JacarandaBanyan/pseuds/JacarandaBanyan
Summary: It started when Mizuki-sensei told Naruto the truth, and Iruka-sensei confirmed it with soft words and open arms.All this time,Naruto thought that night as he lay in bed with his hitai-ate clutched to his chest,there was a reason why everyone hated me.All this time, everyone else knew that thing was inside me, but they just let me try and guess what was wrong with me instead of just telling me.Naruto carries on the Third’s legacy as a sort of vengeance.
Relationships: Uchiha Sasuke/Uzumaki Naruto
Comments: 38
Kudos: 349





	The Hokage's Revenge

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ThujaPlicata](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThujaPlicata/gifts).



It started when Mizuki-sensei told Naruto the truth, and Iruka-sensei confirmed it with soft words and open arms. 

_All this time,_ Naruto thought that night as he lay in bed with his hitai-ate clutched to his chest, _there was a reason why everyone hated me._

_All this time, everyone else knew that thing was inside me, but they just let me try and guess what was wrong with me instead of just telling me._

Supposedly it was top-secret. He couldn’t tell any of his classmates, or bring it up with anyone except maybe Jiji and Iruka-sensei.

Some secret. If they didn’t want anyone to know, why did they tell anyone? Surely the civilian lady who ran the takoyaki stand that yelled at him if he got too close or the vegetable seller that pretended he didn’t exist when he tried to buy something hadn’t been there at the Fourth Hokage’s deathbed to see him seal the Nine-Tails into him right before he died. Someone had to have told _them._

Hot tears gathered on his eyelashes, and he angrily wiped them away. He’d just have to convince them that he wasn’t a Demon! Tomorrow he became a real ninja. He’d work hard every day until he became Hokage and everyone had to acknowledge him.

The metal edges of his hitai-ate dug into his palm as he drifted off to sleep.

* * *

“After your parents died, I lost myself in ANBU,” Kakashi said in the same calm, unfocused voice he used when he talked to the memorial stone. “By the time I could bear to think of them again, you seemed to have a handle on things. Besides, the Hokage would have forbidden it. You weren’t supposed to know who your parents were, after all.”

“But why not?” Naruto whined. “Why couldn’t I even know who they were?”

“If it was public knowledge, it would have been easy to connect the dots and realize you were the Jinchuuriki.”

Naruto dug his teeth into his lip so hard he tasted blood, but didn’t say anything else. 

* * *

When they returned from the Land of Waves and they all had to go to the hospital to get checked over by one of the nurses, even though all three of them protested that they were clearly fine. They’d managed to walk all the way back to Konoha, hadn’t they?

Kakashi-sensei had just eye-smiled at them and told them to get a move on. 

“Maa, it’s not such a big deal. Just let them do a few scans, and then you can go.”

When it was their _sensei’s_ turn to get examined, though, he tried to shunshin away. The medinin grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and nearly slapped him as she ran a glowing green hand over his covered eye. 

“You’ve gone and over-exerted yourself again,” she said. “You can’t keep doing this. You have students now. What are they supposed to do if their sensei dies on them in the middle of a crisis?”

“I think they handled it well,” he protested.

“I’m ordering you to go on light duty for a week. And don’t even think of lying at the mission desk, I’m sending them your report just as soon as I’m done with you.”

“Whatever happened to doctor’s confidentiality?” he whined. 

“Ninja don’t get privacy. Surely you’ve learned that by now, Hatake.”

Team 7 sat on the bench against the back wall of the examination room labeled “teammates awaiting care” and watched their sensei give his token protests.

Naruto let his eyes roam over the examination room. He’d never been to the hospital before. It was full of machines he’d never seen before and bottles of stuff with complicated kanji written on the labels. He wasn’t sure he liked it, but he was willing to reserve judgement. 

To his right, Sasuke brooded with greater intensity than usual. Over the course of Kakashi-sensei’s exam, he’d gone stiller and stiller until his occasional blinks were the only indication that he was still alive and not slowly succumbing to rigor mortis. 

Naruto might still be undecided, but he was pretty sure his teammate did _not_ like the hospital. 

Sakura went next, and Kakashi-sensei joined them on the bench. Her examination was much faster than Kakashi-sensei’s- she was far more cooperative than him, and it was clear she had no real injuries aside from some bruises. 

Sasuke’s eye twitched. 

Naruto went next. The medinin tutted over the little puncture wounds littering his body and handed him a roll of bandaids in case they opened up again. Then she changed the bandages on his hand, even though his self-inflicted stab wound had long since healed. She frowned when she saw the unblemished skin, but re-wrapped it anyways with a disinterested reminder to flex it and test it out daily to ensure it was healing correctly without putting too much strain on it. 

“Did you experience any… chakra disturbances? Or anything else strange with your body unrelated to the puncture wounds you sustained?” She asked. 

He smiled, and told her all about how he blasted through Haku’s kekkei genkai. She nodded along and jotted down a note in a file with his name on it, then dismissed him. She hadn’t asked Sakura that question, and when Sasuke slowly rose and shuffled over to get his own examination she didn’t ask him either. 

Some of the excitement of relating his victory faded. If she only asked him, then it must be about the demon fox. She just couldn’t come out and ask because Sasuke and Sakura were there. 

That realization dug into his skin like a burr. The physical memory of Sasuke’s still body in his arms, followed by the burn of chakra and hatred so strong he felt like his very form was distorting, shivered through his body. 

He had to check and make sure his hands hadn’t started glowing red. They weren’t, but when he curled his fingers into a fist he could feel his fingernails digging into his palm like claws. When he relaxed his hand, there were small marks that his usually short, blunt nails should not have left. 

Sasuke’s exam took the longest, since he was the only one who was actually injured. The medinin ran a glowing palm slowly over his whole body, from his neck down to his ankles. Sasuke remained still as a statue through the entire thing. 

The second she dismissed him, Naruto’s teammate was off like a shot. 

“Sasuke, wait!”

He leaped to his feet and charged after the single dot of dark amongst the sea of pale hospital blues and greens. 

“Sasuke, where are you going? Kakashi-sensei was going to take us to get ramen, and we need to write a report and-”

“Shut up, Usuratonkachi!” Sasuke hissed over his shoulder. 

“Hey, Bastard! Where are you _going-?_ ”

Sasuke whirled around and snarled at him. 

“If you’re not going to leave me alone, then meet me at Training Ground Three.” He glared down his nose at him, like he hadn’t thrown his body in front of a cloud of senbon meant for Naruto and let blood drip out of the corner of his lips like rainwater spilling from an overfull gutter to stain his orange jacket just days earlier. “If you’re up for a little _friendly spar.”_

And then he was off again, shoes making loud, frustrated _thuds_ where they slammed into the floor. 

* * *

Naruto met him at Training Ground Three under the harshly slanted almost-dusk light. It glistened painfully off the river, forcing Naruto to squint and look away from the brilliance of it. 

They didn’t speak. Whatever Sasuke was mad about, he wasn’t going to talk about until his knuckles were bruised and split and his legs shook, if he was going to talk at all. He looked like he had to get the rage out first, or it would block up his throat so the words couldn’t get out. 

Or maybe he was just a stubborn bastard. The Land of Waves might have forged them into a proper team, but it didn’t magically make Sasuke any more likable or reasonable. 

Well, good thing Naruto had plenty of rage of his own. 

They stared at each other for a handful of heartbeats. Naruto calculated how long he thought it would take to wear Sasuke down enough for them to communicate with words, then compared his guess to Ichiraku’s closing time. Unfortunately, they probably wouldn’t make it. Maybe he could make a clone to ask Kakashi-sensei to save him a bowl?

Across from him, strange currents swirled in the dark depths of Sasuke’s eyes. _Something_ was going on in Sasuke’s head. Something dark and looking for a spark. 

They moved as one, as though to the sound of a whistle or a bell. Naruto burst into a smattering of clones that fanned out to cover most of the open glade. Sasuke flung himself directly at Naruto, shuriken in hand and teeth bared. 

It wasn’t really a _friendly spar._ It wasn’t even a _clean_ spar - the first kunai to fly from Sasuke’s palm was sharp enough to slice his fingers just from the pressure of his fingers sliding over the edge as he threw it. Naruto thought he could smell the blood from the shallow cuts, but it was probably just the taste of blood on his tongue from the bite marks on his inner lip from the fight on the bridge that still hadn’t healed. 

The only time they’d ever figured out how to be friends was when one of them was on the ground and bleeding, so it made sense that _friendly_ for them was a bloody, sharp-edged thing. Like a knife at their throats that they got to take turns holding. 

Neither of them had gone home, so they only had whatever weapons they managed to not lose in the bloody waters around the bridge back in the Land of Waves. Those were more than enough. 

Naruto charged at Sasuke, dodging the shuriken and taking only the slightest of cuts on the cheek from the kunai. He could feel a thin line of blood welling up across two of his whisker-marks, just a few drops bubbling over the edge of the broken skin before it healed over. Sasuke ran to meet him, feet pounding into the ground like punches, like he wanted to beat the earth itself until it was black and blue.

The memory of burning, hate-filled chakra whispered over his skin with the evening breeze. He shoved it away and focused on Sasuke. 

Their fists slammed together, muscle and bone meeting their mirror with a dull _thud_ like some heavy object clattering to the floor. The force of it exploded up their arms and left afterglows of pain like a pleasant warmth. 

Naruto followed the punch with a kick aimed at Sasuke’s thigh, which Sasuke neatly dodged. He lunged again, letting his momentum carry through into a second kick with his other leg before Sasuke could get his feet under him again. 

He could probably figure out what Sasuke was angry about if he put a little thought to it; the last Uchiha had thrown away his life to save his teammate, and in the process implicitly given up on his goal to bring justice to his brother as judge, jury and executioner. Given up, or maybe failed- Sasuke could take his pick. 

But more important than _why_ of his rival’s anger was the way that anger lit him up from the inside. To Naruto’s eyes, it looked as if Sasuke had lit a Katon inside himself, roaring and visible and barely contained by his flesh, but was letting it burn him up from the inside instead of breathing it out. 

That fire matched the fire burning through Naruto’s body. So many little angers, ill defined in shape, leaped together like little tongues of flame on a pile of tinderwood, until he could feel an uncontrollable inferno building in his gut. 

(Almost like how the Demon chakra had felt as it oozed and burned its way out of him.) 

Sasuke gracefully spun and dodged Naruto’s attacks like a cat. He couldn’t seem to land a hit. It didn’t matter. Just having something to throw himself at like an angry animal helped him release some of the burning feeling inside him. 

The not-quite-sunset light turned the smoke from his clone jutsu blood red as Sasuke’s shuriken poofed them out of existence. He used it as cover to make another lunge. This time, his fist connected with Sasuke’s chin. His knucklebones ground against the bones in his teammate’s jaw, and something _clicked_ with the force of Sasuke’s head snapping back.

The fire inside him snarled with satisfaction. 

Immediately Sasuke was in his face again, blood-red seeping into the black of his eyes the way Kakashi-sensei’s blood had discolored the little puddles of standing water on the bridge-

Sasuke’s fist collided with Naruto’s cheek, erasing that thought before it could fully form.

The force of the blow sent him careening backwards into the dirt. He hit the ground so hard his bones were still rattling as he flipped himself off his back and got his arms and legs underneath him. His fingers dug into the ground, leaving deep gouges like claw marks in the earth. He slid to a halt crouched on all fours. 

_It wasn’t all that long ago that he hadn’t even known the Demon was inside him. What if Mizuki-sensei had never approached him, what if the story had never come out? Would he have gone to the Land of Waves or some mission like it, perhaps with another team after he tried again at the next Academy graduation exam, and felt the same hate-dark chakra like acid in his chakra pathways? What would have happened if it had happened and he hadn’t_ known?

More of his clones fell to Sasuke’s precise taijutsu, clouding up the whole training field with smoke. 

His breath burned in his throat as he lunged towards him, still down on all fours like a rampaging beast. The anger in his chest swelled, threatening to sear through his chakra pathways like lightning and leave nothing but charred remains behind. 

Sasuke emerged mid-leap from the smoke. The sun backlit him so dramatically that only his dark silhouette was visible against the light of the setting sun. 

Naruto jumped to meet him. They crashed together in midair, Sasuke bearing down on him from above and him clawing at Sasuke from below. 

Neither one made any effort to dodge any of the kicks and punches aimed their way. They simply accepted the blows as the price for landing their own. In that moment, it didn’t matter how much their own bruises would hurt. All that mattered was the satisfaction of flesh giving way under their fists. 

_What if one of his teammates had seen? Sakura and Sasuke were just starting to come around. Thankfully neither one had seen the demon chakra leaking through the seal a few days ago, but what if it happened again?_

With a cry of rage, he charged at Sasuke again. 

_The chakra was the Demon’s but the rage had been his own. Did that mean he had to tamp down on his anger all the time, for fear that the Demon might use it to loosen its chains a little? But there was no end to this unwilling cohabitation in his own body. There was no finish line to aim for, no time when he could lay down the burden and feel that his anger was safe enough to let himself feel._

_He couldn’t do that. Already the coals of it were simmering in his mind. The lonely apartment nights after he’d been kicked out of the orphanage. The dirty looks from parents he’d never even seen before when he showed up at the playground. The way everyone turned their backs on him and left him to his misery without even telling him_ why. 

_The memories burned._

His fist connected with Sasuke’s stomach the same instant Sasuke’s fist collided with his left eye. A swell of foreign chakra bubbled up like blood from a wound under his skin, and the black eye that would have given him healed before it could properly begin to form. 

Blue eyes locked with red, and both of them froze. 

Naruto stared into Sasuke’s Sharingan, and saw some red light reflecting off the whites of his eyes, turning them as red as the sharingan itself. Sasuke’s back was to the setting sun; the red light was coming from somewhere else. 

(He never learned not to look into Sasuke’s Sharingan, unlike other longtime opponents of the Uchiha. Perhaps he never learned because Sasuke never punished him for that mistake.)

“Hey, Naruto,” Sasuke said. “What’s wrong with your chakra?”

He looked down in horror. Claws protruded from his red-rimmed fingers, highlighted by the acidic chakra that encased his arms. A drop of blood wavered like a teardrop on the end of one sharpened tip, then fell. It splattered into the dust between his feet. 

In front of him, the fabric around a small slash in Sasuke’s dark blue shirt fluttered in the air currents formed by their chakra-enhanced movements, revealing a shallow gash underneath. The blood was too bright against Sasuke’s pale skin. 

The Demon was back at the surface. 

His heartbeat pounded in his ears. What did he do? Sasuke was here- what if he hurt him? How did he make it stop?

“Hey, Dobe, I asked you a question,” Sasuke said. His lips curled up into a manic smile. “What’s wrong with your chakra, and how come you haven’t brought it out to play before?”

Naruto sucked in a harsh breath, and the Demon chakra pulsed within him. His fear evaporated away, leaving only his smoldering anger and the thrill of the fight behind. 

He liked that smile on Sasuke’s face. It whispered promises of violence and satisfaction. 

“I’m a Jinchuuriki,” he found himself saying. “The Nine-Tailed Fox is sealed inside me, and this is its chakra.”

Sasuke whooped with delight and immediately tried to set him on fire. 

Naruto charged through the flame, letting it burn away the top layer of the Fox’s chakra without ever reaching his skin. His claws tore across Sasuke’s face, leaving three neat claw marks on his cheek. They almost matched the whisker marks on Naruto’s own face. 

“So that’s why,” Sasuke purred. 

Why _what,_ exactly, Naruto didn’t know, but it didn’t matter. Sasuke’s full attention was focused on Naruto, like a sunbeam concentrated through glass, and it burned so good. 

They fought until the sun set and they couldn’t untangle their shadows from the darkness of the night anymore and their bodies ached with the sweet emptiness of tension and satisfaction of mutual and well-executed violence. 

* * *

Sasuke didn't care that he had the Nine-Tailed Fox inside him. He just saw the power it gave him, and rose wild-eyed to the challenge.

Naruto had to remind himself that he had a crush on _Sakura,_ and that love was supposed to be soft and sweet. It certainly wasn't supposed to taste like blood and smoke in his mouth.

* * *

The resentment was already deep-rooted in his heart when Jiraiya told him he was his godfather. 

“Wait, really?” He asked. 

“Yep!” Jiraiya said. He thrust his chest out like some sort of tropical bird doing a silly display dance and gestured at himself with his thumb. “I knew your dad all the way back when he was your age. You look just like him- same hair and everything. I’m kinda surprised, you know. I’d have thought you’d inherit Kushina’s Uzumaki hair, but I guess it’s really a toss-up when you marry outside your clan, huh.”

He smiled blindingly at Naruto. 

“Ahh, that’s so cool! Tell me, tell me! What was Dad like? How did he and Mom meet? Did you know her too, or just Dad?”

The questions poured out of his mouth in a torrent. His mind flew from question to question too fast for him to settle down and process the startling news that he had a godfather. 

He’d had a godfather all this time.

“Don’t you worry, I’m sure we’ll have lots of time on our hands while we’re training! No need to cover everything now.”

Naruto let Jiraiya turn the conversation around to an outline of a training regimen for him to stick to over the next couple of weeks. His thoughts turned to Sasuke and his failure to bring him back, and the realization that he had a godfather who had known his parents slipped to the back of his mind. 

But he didn’t forget. And as the days turned to weeks and he watched Jiraiya travel from bathhouse to brothel, chasing down rumors and churning out erotic novels, that realization hardened into a solid weight in his chest. 

_This is important too,_ he told himself. _Konoha needs someone out here, following up on leads and listening for the sorts of things you don’t hear about if you spend all your time in the village._

But Jiraiya wasn’t the most efficient spymaster in the world, and his justifications felt more and more hollow. Couldn’t Jiraiya have found the time to come visit him every once in a while, at least? Surely he could have taken a pass on a couple of bathhouses to make time for a courtesy call, right? Hell, this work wasn’t even all that dangerous, especially not for a shinobi of Jiraiya’s caliber. It wasn’t like he was doing infiltration or anything like that where he might get caught by enemy nin. Couldn’t he have taken Naruto with him?

* * *

When Naruto learned the truth of the Uchiha Massacre, he all but shouted it from the roof tops. 

“It’s a state secret, Naruto,” one of the Chunin who worked at the Hokage Tower insisted. “Lord Third wanted it to remain that way.”

Naruto smiled a fox smile at her, and by the end of the day every member of his graduating class knew. So did everyone a few years older or younger, and the Jounin-senseis he was familiar with, and their allies from Sand, and Teuchi at the ramen stand, and the missing nin Ino caught outside the village and dragged back to T&I. 

He spreads the story far and wide, and hopes it reaches Sasuke. It's the only love letter he can send that would mean anything to him.

* * *

He meets the other Jinchuuriki. All of them had always known what they were.

* * *

For a missing-nin, Sasuke managed to show up quite a lot. Naruto certainly wasn’t going to complain, but it was worth pointing out. 

They clashed, teeth bared and palms lit with their signature attacks. 

At first they had used taijutsu against each other, and Naruto had gloried in the solid, perfectly-aimed hits and the pain that ached down from bruising skin to his very bones. He’d come to associate that particular pain with being as close to Sasuke as possible, and it was almost enough to make him calm the storm of contradictory feelings that raged every time he fought Sasuke. 

Naruto didn’t react when Sasuke brought his snakes out to play, and Sasuke didn’t so much as blink when the Kyuubi chakra seeped out and formed an aura around Naruto. They just kept fighting and fighting, even as night fell and they could only see each other by the light of the moon and the glow of their attacks. 

When their dance of kicks and punches could no longer satisfy and their stores of kunai had been burnt through, the lovely forms and stances they’d been taught at the Academy fell to the wayside. Instead, they flung their bodies at each other like projectiles, arms outstretched and eyes locked. 

Sasuke’s Chidori met Naruto’s Rasengan head on, and the resulting explosion shook the ground and lit up the forest for miles around.

By the time the light faded, they had risen from where they’d been knocked to the ground and stood facing each other again. 

“Sasuke,” Naruto said through a smile full of blood. Even as his tongue swiped out to play with the tooth that had come loose, the demon chakra healed the damage and sealed it back into his gums. “Why can’t you come back? Your brother is dead, Danzo is dead, the Akatsuki are dead or headed that way.”

Sasuke made a dismissive, angry noise, but didn’t say anything. The first rays of sunrise illuminated his Sharingan. They had fought through the night. 

“You said you had to leave the village to gain power, and to avenge your clan. And you did that! You’re strong enough to take on a Sannin, and everyone who had a hand in your clan’s massacre is dead. Why aren’t you back home yet?”

“How can I go back?” Sasuke howled. “How can I possibly go home, when I have no home to return to?”

“Konoha-”

“It’s been a long time since Konoha’s been my home, idiot! I turned my back on them and they turned their back on me. They stayed silent while my clan was isolated and limited in ways none of the rest of them were, even though we were one of the founding families, and even now that the truth is out and they all must know that the massacre wasn’t what it seemed they _still_ honor the Third and insist that Konoha is _good_ and _right._ ”

The wind blew Sasuke’s billowing, ripped-up shirt behind him, baring his tense arms and whipping his black hair back from his angry red eyes. 

“And I’ve paid them back for it in blood! I slew my brother their spy, and I slew their councilmen, and when Pein marched on them I came with him, wearing his colors and prepared to watch the village burn and fracture and finally disappear from this world! I’ve turned my sword on my commanders and I’ve severed the bonds I had with my friends. So tell me, Naruto, how can I go back now?”

“You haven’t severed _our_ bond, Sasuke.”

Sasuke hissed like an offended cat and stabbed Naruto in the shoulder. Naruto kicked his sword arm and used the momentum to push himself back and off the blade. Kurama’s burning chakra flared up and sealed the wound.

Without dropping eye contact, Sasuke extended Kusanagi and ran his Lightning chakra through it. Sparks of light blue spiderwebbed along the blade. Naruto’s blood ran down the sharp edge. 

“Come back,” Naruto repeated. “I’m going to be Hokage, and I’ll pardon you. I’ll make sure everyone knows the truth, and so long as I live I’ll never let it happen again. You can still go on missions and leave the village sometimes to see Team Taka, and you can make a new home!”

“That’s not how it works, you idiot! I can’t just rebuild what I had before. I’m not the man I used to be, and neither is anyone else. Every time they see me, they’ll see the ghost of who I was before, and so long as Konoha stands, it stands haunted by the Uchiha Clan.”

“Then _I’ll_ be your home,” Naruto yelled. “If you can’t come home for anyone else, at least come home to me.”

The offer hung in the air like the white flag of surrender. Then, the red slowly drained from Sasuke’s eyes and tears began to spill down his cheeks. 

Behind them, the sun began to rise. 

* * *

The nagging feeling came to fruition when Sasuke finally came back to the village. 

Naruto was used to the strange absence of other people’s eyes on him, like no one around him could possibly care less if he fell or needed help or pulled off a prank. The weight of the village’s disgusted dismissal had followed him around his entire childhood. 

Which was why it felt so strange to suddenly feel an entirely different weight as he walked the streets of Konoha; everywhere he went, people watched him. 

Sometimes familiar faces called out warm greetings to him. Other times strangers pointed or whispered _is that him?_ Still others just watched in silence, evaluating him from a distance and coming to unknown conclusions without ever speaking to him. 

Acknowledgement was a strange achievement to come to later in life for a friendless orphan like Naruto, who was so used to exactly the opposite. It made his skin prickle and shivers run down his spine, but not necessarily in a bad way.

The feeling of recognition was even stronger when he walked with Sasuke. 

Unlike when he walked alone or with someone else, however, the quality of the stares was incredulous and often edging into hostility. It was a good thing Sasuke didn't seem to care, or it would have been a chore to get him to leave the little house they shared on the edge of the old Uchiha Compound.

And Naruto thought back on his childhood, and the silences that had followed every attempt for him to figure out why he was hated. He thought back to how he had given up trying to figure out why adults didn’t like him before he even got the the Academy, and how he had latched on to Iruka-sensei like a lifeline when finally, one adult in the entire village thought he was worth something, and of the rages and despairs that he had weathered. 

Most importantly, he thought back to the many, many adults who, when he eventually asked (begged them to tell him why-), said in solemn voices that _it was better that way, the Hokage just wanted you to grow up unburdened by the knowledge, it was the Hokage’s will, all that Demon business was best left in the past, and anyway it wouldn’t have changed anything if you knew, now would it?_ The order of the platitudes changed, and different shinobi had slightly different slants on it, but that was what it boiled down to. 

And Naruto thought, _hey, wait a second._

_I’m the Hokage now._

* * *

The next day, Konoha woke up to a new proclamation from the Hokage. 

The first part made some shoulders bristle, but anyone who knew Naruto knew it was coming eventually. The Uchiha massacre was to be declassified and added to the official curriculum of Konoha history. Over the next year, funds would be raised for a monument to the victims. 

But it was the second part that contained Naruto’s revenge. 

_It is the will of the Hokage that no person, be they Shinobi or Civilian, mention any crimes committed before this day by Sasuke Uchiha. Sasuke Uchiha’s role in the Fourth Shinobi War, his participation in the Akatsuki, and his desertion of the village, are henceforth state secrets. Those who speak of them will be punished._

Veteran Konoha shinobi who remembered Sasuke’s desertion gnashed their teeth. The Konoha Twelve sighed and tried to lock away the memories of betrayal and desperation and their failure to keep him from going to Orochimaru, and later their constant failure to make him return. Guardsmen remembered his attack on the Council and tried to press down their anger. Civilians who remembered Pein’s attack on the Konoha and Sasuke’s decision to don the Akatsuki’s cloak went to the Hokage tower before they even had their breakfasts to petition against the proclamation. 

In his office, Naruto smiled and welcomed them all in. 

“I’m not changing my mind,” he said. “Isn’t it better left in the past, after all? Sasuke’s a loyal Konoha shinobi now.”

“You can’t silence this!” 

“Why not? Is forbidding people to speak of certain things not within the Hokage’s power? There’s a long, proud tradition of Hokages giving this same order, you know!”

“Naruto, please. Everyone knows his crimes. What purpose does our silence serve?”

 _Everyone knew I was the Jinchuuriki,_ he thought. 

“It is my will as Hokage,” he said. “That’s always been enough for you before. Has something changed?”

For a second, he was sure that this was what would bring his shinobi to break discipline. 

Then an Anbu Captain bowed their head as though accepting a mission.

“No, Lord Hokage,” they said. “We obey you as loyal shinobi of the village.”

One by one, the other ninja followed their lead and bowed to his orders. 

Naruto had never felt the allure of revenge before. Perhaps, he thought, he could see what Sasuke found so compelling about it.


End file.
